Fraker and Denver Project

Prey exhibit a wide variety of phenotypic traits (e.g., behavior, morphology, developmental rates) that help them defend against predators, but also affect how they interact with their environment (e.g., what and when they forage, interactions with other species). This project aims to identify how stress hormones regulate how prey express and integrate phenotypic traits over time and what the resulting impacts on prey fitness are. The long-term goal is to identify the mechanisms that govern prey stress physiology and predator-induced phenotypic plasticity in order to understand how predator-prey interactions impact ecological communities.